Sunday, April 06, 2008

The Wrongs of Spring

If we had a FJM Declaration of Purpose, it would be to point out that you can't just say things like this and get away with them:

(ESPN Sunday Night Baseball, Miller and Morgan, on the subject of the Tigers)

Miller: That's a tough way to go to Fenway: 0-6.

Morgan: Well, every day you lose, though, Jon, the percentage is in your favor. I know it sounds a little bizarre, but a team as good as this team, 0-5 you figure: the percentage is in their favor.

Theoretically, I suppose what he is saying is that the team is "due" to win a game. Sadly, the purpose of a baseball season is not to win one game, but rather to win enough games to make the playoffs. Thus, the only possible thing you can say about the Tigers starting 0-6 is: that is a terrible start.

(The FJM Declaration of Purpose would be a small, unassuming Word document written in Helvetica. There would be a lot of cursing in it. And 26 years from now, when alien archæologists find nothing on our decimated planet but this document, they will assume it was the basis for our societal norms and government, and a new society will arise, and no one will ever write anything stupid about GlormBall, which is their national pastime.)

Unrelated postscript: Homeplate ump Jeff Kellogg just took a fastball to the face because A.J. Pierzynski seemed to get crossed up and just missed it. So he takes a fastball to the face and goes down like a sack of potatoes, and Jon Miller says, as they prepare a replay, "He's wearing a microphone, let's go back and have a look...) And I think, "Don't play the dude's audio!!!" And then they roll the replay, and it -- incredibly predictably -- goes like this:

(smack)

Pierzynski: Oh -- my God.Kellogg: (on the ground) Fuck.

Come on ESPN. What word did you think was going to come out of a dude's mouth in that situation?

To those of you who wrote in about the idea of being "due" to win: fear not. I understand that this is not a thing that exists in the realm of mathematical probability, and twas not like endorsing the idea that if that's what Joe meant, that he would be right.